Amaterasu is a haunted woman, widowed and living in self-imposed exile in America. She has resisted learning English and spends more time with a whiskey bottle than she cares to admit. She considers herself responsible for her daughter’s death and guilt has consumed her for 40 years.

Given its slender size, this novel’s title seems at first to be impossibly ambitious. How can it be possible to condense a man’s whole life into a mere 124 pages? To achieve that would require some sort of literary wizardry.

Born just minutes apart and living next door to each other, Emmy and Oliver were destined to be best friends, and they were for the first seven years of their lives, until Oliver was taken away by his dad.

The Seed Collectors tells the story of the Gardener family following the death of a mysterious great-aunt, Oleandar, and the implications of her curious legacy - packets of fatal seeds that might explain some of their dark history.

The stories in Lethem’s latest collection feature, among other things, a man named Pending Vegan trying to survive a psychological beating at SeaWorld, a blog that seems to have a physical existence and must be defended as if it were a castle, a girl who orgasms by hearing per

Translated from its original Portugese by David Brookshaw, Couto’s short novel is a powerful and absorbing read. Told alternately by an imported hunter and a local woman, the story weaves past and present dangers through the family home and into the forest.

Trollhunters tracks the coming-of-age of Jim Sturgess Jnr., a seemingly ordinary kid with an over-protective father. Jim’s uncle, Jack, was the last child to vanish during a spate of child disappearances in 1969, the last of the "milk carton kids".